"I'm some kind of anti-Browning": the counterpoint of the English pretext and subtext in the "Poem without a Hero" of A. Akhmatova

The English poet of the XIX century, Robert Browning, little known in Russia, was a significant figure for Anna Akhmatova. As G.P. Mikhailova notes, "Pointing out to writers, translators, readers the sources of the poem, Akhmatova, along with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok mentions Paul Valery and the English post-romantic Robert Browning. The latter – in connection with the lines "He is not waiting for gout and glory / In a hurry to sit him down / In the jubilee magnificent chairs ..." ^[14]. As a rule, in the context of the sources of the "Poem without a Hero" Browning appears only in connection with these lines. In the notes to the Poem without a Hero, it is noted that the lines about gout and fame refer to "the poem by the English poet Robert Browning (1812-1899) "Dis Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours" (1864) ("The Gods judged differently, or Byron of our days"), where "gout", "glory", a warm armchair, being attributes of imminent old age, are opposed to beauty, love, fantasies – attributes of passing youth. ... Akhmatova pointed out: "Browning – (gout seated. Dis aliter visum)» ^{[8, 910]}.

At the same time, Robert Browning was part of Akhmatova's reading circle, was extremely interesting to her, and she read it in the original in English. "Browning is one of the English–speaking authors from Akhmatova's non-Russian reading circle. In the heading "Dates" in Akhmatova's notebooks, it shows that since the autumn of 1927 she began to study English and six months later read Thackeray with a parallel translation into Russian, then Byron, "then Keats, Browning" ^[14]. In this regard, it should be assumed that in the extensive and extremely important text for Akhmatova "Poems without a hero" there is not the only allusion to the work of this poet.

Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett, who also wrote poetry, were important to A.A. Akhmatova not only as authors, but also as a point of reference: in fact, Akhmatova and Gumilev were the same pair of spouses-poets. In the memoirs of N.Y. Mandelstam, the phrase of A.A. Akhmatova is quoted, "once Gumilev told her that they two would be like Brownings - during his lifetime the glory went to his wife, after death the husband suddenly grew up, and the wife almost disappeared" ^{[11, 479]}. As G.P. Mikhailova notes, the leitmotif of Akhmatova's work in the context of comparing the Gumilev-Akhmatova pair with the Browning-Barrett pair is the defense of the self-identification of her work, the absence of the influence of her poet husband, the formation of an independent creative unit. "At the level of the characters, the Browning theme of the duel of a man and a woman is reduced by Akhmatova to the theme of the duel of pronounced creative "I". But this duel turns out to be beyond the text of the "myth of the poet" in the "Poem without a Hero" and is reflected in a different semiotic space – in Akhmatova's memoirs and a number of poems" ^[15].

Among Browning's poems that influenced the work of Akhmatova, G.P. Mikhailova, such works as "Youth and Art" ("Youth and Art"), "Bifurcation" ("Bifurcation"), "Too Late" ("Too Late") are listed. Together with the above-mentioned "Dis Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours", these works form a semantic complex of the "poet's sin", his guilt and punishment. In our opinion, in this context, one more work should be added to the list of Browning's poems that served as sources of allusions in Akhmatova's work – the diptych of 1836, consisting of the poems "Porphyria's Lover" ("Porphyria's Lover") and "My last duchess" ("My last Duchess"), which was not previously considered in connection with the work of A.A. Akhmatova.

Both Browning's poems are dedicated to the murder of a lover, which was committed by a man. They were translated into Russian by Grigory Kruzhkov ^[9]. A.A. Akhmatova got acquainted with these works in the original, and the motives of them are reflected in the "Poem without a Hero". In some cases, G. Kruzhkov's translation does not convey the shades of meaning of the original, therefore, for this study, translations from English were made by one of the co–authors of this article (hereinafter marked "our translation - E.D.").

"Porphyria's Lover" is a dramatic emotional monologue written on behalf of a man to whom his beloved Porphyria came. The girl came to the man in a storm, in heavy rain, the description of which opens the text. Porfiry arrived to her lover soaked, and began to take off her wet clothes. Soon, from the context of the poem, it turns out that she came to give herself to her beloved. The beloved is confused and does not know what to do. Porfiry announces that her intention is to "give herself to me for ever", and he, after some internal struggle, decides to kill her, and strangles Porfiry with her own hair. Further, the lyrical hero continues to sit in an embrace with his already dead lover, putting her head on his shoulder. The poem ends with the words:

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word! ^[2]

(And we're sitting together now,

And so we didn't move during the whole night,

And God didn't say a word!)

(our translation is E.D.)

In the translation of G. Kruzhkov we see:

We sit and wait in silence for the morning.

But no star will tremble;

And the night goes on, and God is silent ^[9].

In translation, thus, the meaning of "we did not move" is lost: in the translator's description, the poem is constructed as if the lyrical hero is sitting with a living lover. Meanwhile, Browning referred to the tradition of post mortem photographs, common in Victorian England – the genre of posthumous photos in which a deceased person was given such a pose as if he were alive ^[3]. Porphyria's lover places an already dead body in the same way:

I propped her head up as before,

Only, this time my shoulder bore

Her head, which droops upon it still ^[2]

I installed her head as before,

And only now is her head

Lay on my shoulder

(our translation is E.D.)

The lyrical hero refers to the moment from the beginning of the poem, when Porfiry herself tries to seduce him, attract him to herself:

She put my arm about her waist,

And made her smooth white shoulder bare,

And all her yellow hair displaced,

And, stooping, made my cheek lie there ^[2]

(She put my hand on her waist,

She bared her smooth white shoulder,

Her golden hair was disheveled,

She drew me to her (literally "tilted so that my cheek was there")

(our translation is E.D.)

In the translation of G. Kruzhkov, this moment of manipulation with a dead body is also lost, which is extremely important for Browning in the context of the study of the unhealthy psyche of the protagonist:

Leaning on a friend's shoulder,

She seemed cheerful ^[9]

The reference to post mortem is embodied in the second poem of Browning's diptych, “My last duchess", written on behalf of Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (as indicated by the author's litter "Ferrara" before the beginning of Browning's text). The duke married Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici, abandoned her a year later, and two years later she died, according to the official version – from tuberculosis ^[4]. Browning interprets the plot as the duke's murder of the duchess for her excessive cheerfulness: the husband was annoyed that his wife was smiling at everyone, and he gave the order to destroy her. The poem is a monologue story addressed to a guest, to whom the duke shows a portrait of his deceased wife. In the portrait, she is "as alive": "There she stands / As if alive" ^[1] (She stands here / as alive), and now only her husband can admire her smile. Browning's poem, written in 1842, resonates with E. Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait" ("In Death – life"), created in the same year.") ^{[16, 543 – 546]}, the hero of which is an artist – draws his beloved, taking away her vital forces, and at the end of the portrait the model falls dead. The action of the "Oval Portrait" also takes place in Italy and dates back to the Renaissance: the narrator finds the portrait in an old castle and describes the history of its creation.

Browning, therefore, undertakes a study of the unhealthy, manic psyche of murderers in the genre of a dramatic monologue in the first person. "Porphyria's Lover" also refers to historical precedents reflected in literature and journalism: "Commentators point out that one of the sources of "Porphyria's Lover" was Cornwall's poem "Marcian Column" (which Pushkin read and even tried to translate). After killing his beloved, Colonna stayed near her for a whole night, "like a nurse," only to see and feel "a gentle, forgiving smile." Another source of the poem was "Excerpts from Gossen's diary" published in Blackwood Magazine as a translation from a manuscript allegedly written by a German priest who confessed a condemned man to death, but in fact these "Excerpts" were composed by a regular employee of the magazine John Wilson"^[10]. G. Kruzhkov traces the connection "The Lover of Porphyria" with Pushkin's "Little Tragedies", pointing to the study of painful manifestations of the human psyche in the works of both poets.

The motifs of the Browning diptych were significantly reflected in the text of the Poem without a Hero, and many complexes of motifs are mirrored, "inverted" (cf. "I write with a mirror letter" ^{[8, 891]}). First of all, in the text of the "Poem", from the first edition onwards, there are references to the suicide of Vsevolod Knyazev (the image of the "dragoon cornet / hussar cornet / dragoon Pierrot"), who shot himself because of unrequited love for Olga Glebova-Sudeikina ^{[8, 918]}. Thus, the situation described by Browning is reversed: Akhmatova has a man dying and a woman refuses him, Browning has a woman dying and a man does not accept her love. 

The external features of the alter ego of the main character mentioned in the poem correlate with the description of Porphyria: she is described as a "blonde miracle", "there are scarlet spots on your cheeks", she has "kissing shoulders" and a "fawn curl". Browning's Porphyria is also blonde (the text mentions her hair color three times – “yellow”, yellow), she shows her lover her shoulder, expecting a kiss from him (but does not wait). After the murder, a lover's kiss is imprinted on the cheek of the dead Porphyria, like a scarlet spot: "her cheek once more / Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss" ("her cheek once again / Flared up under my burning kiss" - our translation – E.D.). In Akhmatova's text, addressing the heroine, the beloved says "I will leave you alive" ^{[8, 887]}, thereby indicating, that there was an intention to kill the heroine, but in the end it was not realized.

Porphyria's features are also embodied in the heroine associated with the author himself. So, the line "I will enter myself / Lace shawl without taking off" ("Turkish shawl without taking off", as a rule, is read by commentators through a reference to the famous yellow oriental shawl – a gift of N.S. Gumilev, which is mentioned in the poems of A.A. Blok and O.E. Mandelstam as a detail of the image of Akhmatova ^{[8, 906]}. Akhmatova mentions that she liked the shawl, warmed her during the hours of constant chills ^{[8, 906]}. Meanwhile, in "Porphyria's Lover" there is also a shawl, which Porphyria removes, thereby indicating her intentions:

she rose, and from her form

Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl

(She got up, and from her figure

She took off her soaked raincoat and shawl)

(our translation is E.D.)

Browning's lyrical hero pays special attention to the weather on the evening when Porfiry came to her lover: it was raining, the wind was blowing.

The rain set early in to-night,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

And did its worst to vex the lake ^[2]

(It started raining early tonight,

The sullen wind quickly woke up,

He tilted the tops of the elms

And raised the waters of the lake)

(our translation is E.D.)

Porfiry takes off her soaked raincoat indoors, which is natural, but taking off the shawl is already an excessive action, the beginning of her fall. The heroine of the lines of the "Poem without a hero" opposes herself to Porfiry: she also comes by herself, but does not take off her shawl, does not initiate her fall – and does not perish.

The motif of taking off the cloak is also present in the text of the poem: the lyrical heroine encourages her guests to take off their cloaks in the hallway:

...But the masks are in the hallway,

And cloaks, and wands, and crowns

You will have to leave today" ^{[8, 875]}

The situation is reversed again: in Browning, Porfiry herself comes to the hero and takes off her raincoat, in Akhmatova, the heroine calls men to visit, and she herself tells them that they should take off their raincoats.

Browning's poem does not explicitly indicate the reasons for the hero's act, which strangled Porfiry. The presence of such epithets as "fair" ("honest, fair"), "pure" ("pure"), as well as the comparison of the drooping head of a dead lover with an unopened flower bud – a common metaphor for virginity – suggests that he killed Porphyria so that she would remain immaculate. However, the heroine's name – the only proper name indicated in Browning's text - suggests that there is a second semantic plane in the text. "Porphyria" is a rare, little-used name in the English-speaking environment, it has a Greek origin and refers to porphyry (crimson mantle) as an attribute of royal power. The hero refuses not only the love of the girl Porphyria, but also the power, the kingdom, which connects the poem with the later "Dis Aliter Visum", the hero of which also rejects the attributes of glory – the corresponding line is explicitly quoted by Akhmatova in "A Poem without a Hero".

The text of Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" is multi-semantic and multi-layered: with an abundance of everyday details in it (descriptions of the house, clothes of the main character, etc.), several different layers of meaning are read in it. So, in addition to the two reading options presented above, there is a third one: the author focuses on the fact that in such a terrible storm the hero was sitting in a cold and unheated house: it was Porphyria who came to him, lit a fire, and the house was filled with warmth.

She shut the cold out and the storm,

And kneeled and made the cheerless grate

Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; ^[2]

(She closed the door, leaving the cold and storm outside,

She knelt down, fanned the joyless grate,

And the house was filled with warmth)

(our translation is E.D.)

Perhaps the lyrical hero himself is already dead (and does not feel cold from this), and he kills Porphyria in order to reunite with her in eternal life: it is not by chance that at the end of the text it is noted that they did not move all night, and God "did not say a word", that is, he did not condemn the murderer in any way. In this case, Browning's poem presents an inverted motif of the "dead groom" - not the dead man comes for the girl, as in the ballads of Burger and Zhukovsky ("Lenora", "Lyudmila", "Svetlana", etc.), but on the contrary, the heroine comes to the dead lover and dies after him. In this reading, the poem conveys a situation that is the reverse of the motive of the arrival of the dead groom in the "Poem without a hero".

Akhmatova's heroine, waiting for the dead guests, also feels "wet cold", and just like Browning, it is the woman who lights the fire: "I lit the cherished candles" ^{[8, 875]}. In general, her actions at the moment of meeting with lovers who came from the other world, as if mirroring the actions of the heroes of Browning's "Porphyria's Lover". Taking into account the fact that in Akhmatova's notebooks she directly said about herself "I am some kind of anti-Browning" ^{[5, 476]}, it should be assumed that the poem "Porfiry's Lover" is one of the hidden, encrypted sources of the text of the "Poem without a Hero", inverted by Akhmatova's "mirror letter"

The second part of Browning's diptych, "My Last Duchess", is also associated with the text of "Poems without a Hero". First of all, they are connected by common motives with the text of the story by E. Poe, whose influence on the "Poem without a Hero" and "Prose about a Poem" is traced in detail in the study by L.G. Kihney and A.V. Lamzina ^[7]. The text of the Poem without a Hero also mentions a living portrait:

Well you're all running away together,

As if everyone has found a bride,

Leaving eye to eye

Me in the twilight with a black frame,

From which the same one looks out,

Which has become the hottest drama

And an hour not yet mourned? ^{[8, 878]}

The situation played out by Browning is mirrored again: the hero of "My Last Duchess" kills his wife himself, and voluntarily remains with her portrait instead of a living wife, and her guests run away from the heroine of "Poem without a Hero" themselves, leaving her in the company of the portrait. The line "everyone found a bride" also refers to the plot of "The Last Duchess": her lyrical hero has already found a new bride to replace the deceased:

I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object ^[1].

I repeat,

What is the nobility of the Count you know –

A guarantee that he is sincere

And will not refuse a dowry,

Although, as I stated from the very beginning, my goal is –

His honest daughter herself

(our translation is E.D.)

The head of Madame de Lamballe mentioned in the text of the Poem without a Hero ^{[8, 880]}, which is associated with the historical context of the French Revolution and with the poem of the same name by M. Voloshin, also refers to the image of the "last duchess": Madame de Lamballe, who also had the title of duchess, beautiful and cheerful, was torn to pieces by the crowd.

Thus, Robert Browning's diptych "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess", united by the theme of the murder of the beloved and her posthumous presence in the life of the murderer, should be considered one of the hidden, encrypted, hidden in the "triple bottom of the box" sources of the text of the "Poem without a Hero" by A. Akhmatova. Through the motifs and situations taken from this text and inverted in a mirror way, the connection of the poem's text with the historical context of Renaissance Italy, the tradition of post mortem photographic art in Victorian England, the "Little Tragedies" of A.S. Pushkin, etc. is built. In addition, the "Poem without a Hero" is related to the Browning diptych by the contexts of tragic misunderstanding, the lack of dialogue between the characters. Porfiry's lover does not understand and does not accept her intentions, the duke does not understand and does not accept his wife's cheerfulness and finds her smiles and gratitude offensive. The dialogues of the lyrical heroine of the "Poem without a Hero" and her double with her lovers also tragically break off, forcing fatal contexts of misunderstandings. In the context of established intertextual connections, Akhmatova's words "I am some kind of anti-Browning" should be deciphered not only as a comment on the posthumous fame of Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett, but also as a reference to the mirror inversion of situations from two famous Browning poems.